The end of affiliate arb

Hope everyone had a good break. I’m skipping CES this year, so 2025 is off to a calmer start. Today, a conversation about the Information Space in 2025 and another with Mike Mallazzo about the year ahead in affiliate/commerce.

Unlock audience insights that drive revenue

First-party data is no longer optional—it's the backbone of successful ad strategies. Publishers need actionable audience insights to boost engagement and grow ad revenue.

How Daily Mail Ireland (DMG) did it:

By using Opinary’s in-article polls, Daily Mail Ireland collected user-declared data and channeled it into their DMP, Permutive. This not only increased engagement but also drove higher CTRs and CPMs, building stronger advertiser relationships along the way.

Hear directly from Doug Farrell, DMG’s group head of digital advertising strategy, on how first-party data transformed their approach.

The Information Space in 2025

The biggest theme of 2025 will be the rise of alternative media. The election was a stark reminder that the media industry has fragmented and energy has shifted from the center to the edges. On the latest episode of People vs Algorithms, we discuss the outlook for mainstream media (not great) vs alternative media (far better), and get into a debate about X. I’m trying to start the year by spending far less time on X, since I find it optimized to hijack attention (more on this in Thursday’s newsletter), yet I recognize that it will be a force in shaping opinion and pushing issues into the mainstream. 

We also get into how this year will see the rise of AI agents that will proactively curate information. AI is very good already at summarization and versioning. That is a lot of the media business. The ad business will see a flood of AI-created commercial content. Jason Zada showed the potential with The Heist, a video created using Google’s text-to-video tool Veo. Finally, we get into how the long-running culture wars are moving into class wars.

Check out the PvA newsletter. It comes out every Friday as a companion to the podcast. We are doing a conversational format.

Get the PvA podcast on YouTube | Apple | Spotify | other podcast platforms

The end of affiliate arbitrage

Affiliate marketing is a perfect encapsulation of the promises and flaws of digital media. The entire promise of internet marketing was that it would do away with the opacity that defined traditional media. For advertisers, it could act as a customer vending machine. For publishers, it offered a compelling alternative to CPM ads that would give them more control over their business.

Like most things on the internet, affiliate also became rife with abuse. The Honey saga is a great example of this. The coupon toolbar – my experience says expect sketchiness with toolbar companies – was seemingly caught red handed with dubious practices that benefited Honey at the expense of creators, customers and advertisers. Also of note: This investigation of Honey’s practices was done by YouTuber MegaLag.

The popularity of affiliate operations, both large and small, has caused headaches for Google, with the search results pages in disarray. Google spent the last year taking aggressive actions to rein in some of the abuses of affiliate, and inevitably has crushed many businesses. It’s another reminder that Google is the de facto arbiter of the open web. The helpful content update and search reputation abuse efforts were aimed at SEO arbitrage that many publishers have fallen back on.

It’s also a reminder that the incentives for publishers are always to push the envelope. I’m not sure if Forbes has expertise in erectile-dysfunction treatments, but it is responding to market signals. 

Mike Mallazzo, writer of the reliably excellent Zero Clicks newsletter from Martech Record and a veteran of digital publishing and marketing, joined me on The Rebooting Show to discuss the state of affiliate and what to expect in the category in 2025. The hopeful view: The efforts to stamp out affiliate arbitrage  will ultimately reward those who put in the work to create high-quality content that’s actually useful, as opposed to churning out affiliate content to arbitrage their brand’s high ranking in the search results pages. As Mike points out, "Without huge arbitrage opportunities, affiliate is a bad business model... We had a 10-year golden era of arbitrage that made affiliate a great business model.” 

Get The Rebooting Show on Apple | Spotify | other podcast platforms

Thanks for reading. I’ll have an essay on Thursday on AI and the subprime attention crisis. Send me a note with feedback by hitting reply.